Repeat After Me

by Rachel Dewoskin

  On the train home that day, I peered out at everyone, furious. I must have looked like Da Ge, a defiant teenager glaring up from under my eyelids. A woman walked into the subway car yanking at her tangled hair and kicking something invisible in front of her, turning me into a portrait of stability and balance. Insanity is relative, that’s the funny thing. Who was I to be spending thousands of dollars on therapy when there were people with actual problems? Rows of the less insane ran their eyes along the lines of newspapers and magazines while the kicking woman growled out, “So fuck that, just fuck that. You think that, fuck that. You die alone. You die alone! Fuck that.” She pushed sideways through the door to the next car.

  A couple of teenagers giggled. We were all, of course, both connected to, and implicated, by the woman. Everyone has at least one nutcase in the family, and in most families, no one can even agree on who it is.

  If I saw Dr. Holderstein now, I wouldn’t know whether to apologize, thank him, or gloat. He warned me, and if I had listened, it might have spared me (and my mom) some genuine suffering. On the other hand, I survived, am maybe a better person for having gone under water that deep. I won the silver lining of a lifetime in Julia Too. So I guess I could tell Dr. Holderstein that he was right and so was I: it’s all relative. I didn’t need a shrink after all, because all it took was loving Da Ge, and I was never the crazy one again. He stole that thunder, turned me sane.

  Julia Too and I spent Thanksgiving of 2002 in the suburb of Shunyi at my friend Shannon’s house. Shannon is my closest American friend in Beijing and the mother of one of Julia Too’s classmates, a firecracker of a kid named Sophie. Sophie broke a window at the school last year, painted a naked man for her final art project, and filled condoms with water on “water balloon” day. As a teacher and role model at Global Beijing, I’m supposed to find her behavior abhorrent, but she’s a twinkly, charming girl, and I rather like her troublemaking. Of course, it wasn’t my window or my condoms. And she’s not my kid.

  Shannon is something of a rebel herself; when she arrived in Beijing at age twenty-two, she was a radical leftist. She dressed in Communist Party kitsch, wore her hair in Mao-girl peasant pigtails, and dated Chinese intellectuals. She still has a CPC star tattooed on her right hip. But to hear her tell it, she got so tired of soapboxing and being soap-boxed that she has cast herself, mostly for entertainment’s sake, as America’s advocate. So now she runs a media consulting company and fights flirtily with her husband Zhang Sun, pretending to be more patriotic than she is. Partially, this is because living in China for decades at a time will make you feel an occasional stab of patriotism and nostalgia no matter how critical of the United States you may be, but mainly it’s a staple of her and Zhang Sun’s romance. He likes the idea that she’s an untamable, wild American girl, even if it’s basically untrue.

  I love Zhang Sun because he’s charming and unflappable, looks like a young Mao, and loves to tell dirty jokes. He likes me because I’m the only one who laughs. The funny thing is, I barely even get what he’s saying, but I find Zhang Sun’s delivery hilarious. He has an unusually expressive face. My favorite of his jokes is the one I’m sure I do get, about a peasant named “Old Wang,” who is famous for his huge “second brother.” When Old Wang dies, a doctor cuts off the “second brother” and is studying it by the light of a desk lamp when his wife intrudes. Surprised, the doctor drops the specimen, and his wife, upon seeing it “roll across the floor,” cries out, “Oh no! Old Wang is dead?!” Zhang Sun always looks devastated when he gets to that line. Sometimes he even tears up. I love it.

  Shannon hates the Old Wang joke, but she enjoys setting me up on dates. No one who is happily married can tolerate a single friend in her thirties. Shannon doesn’t mean for the dates to be monotonous and mortifying. But I hate them. I say awkward and inappropriate things, and then I can’t stop the sarcastic parentheticals from running through my mind like ticker tape about whatever the guy says to try to rescue or amuse us both. It always feels like bad TV.

  On occasion, Shannon’s candidates have ended up being my boyfriends, but even those liaisons have usually ended in embarrassment so profound it only narrowly escapes classification as tragedy. She sets me up with any new Westerner who comes to town, creating and replicating a dynamic so predictable and tedious I almost fall over in the first five minutes of conversation: “You’ve lived here how long!? Wow! Your Chinese must be great! Where can I get (fill in the blank: a lava lamp, a SIM card, a Chinese tutor, a bike helmet)?”

  The embarrassing, fetishist truth is that I prefer Chinese guys. Maybe they just remind me of Da Ge, a racist and tacky possibility. But more likely, it’s because Chinese men ask fewer questions than Westerners do, and I’m grateful for the privacy. Clichés about girls have always surprised me—that we love relationship maintenance, would rather cuddle than have sex, want to talk about our feelings and “work things out.” Maybe I’m a guy, but I prefer sex and breaking up.

  Whenever Shannon has sent me out with Zhang Sun’s Chinese friends, the relationships have blown up, plateaued, or led to marriage proposals over fire liquor and hot pot, when my eyes are watering from garlic smoke and I’ve mumbled incoherently I can’t but it’s not you, it’s me.

  All this to say I had low hopes when I met Yang Tao at dinner. I could tell Shannon had invited him with me in mind because he was well cast, hanging on the periphery like an uncomfortable teenager. I always like men like that. It’s a relief to find someone who is at least as awkward as I am, because then he’s likely to be thinking about his own social anxiety instead of mine. Plus, I like shy guys; they have secrets. Yang Tao looked like he was in his late thirties, which meant he had to be a divorcee. It’s tough to stay unmarried past thirty-five in China—the pressure to produce a grandson is too great. Yang Tao was wearing the kind of glasses that inspire mockery at school. I was glad he wasn’t a little kid anymore, and wondered if his childhood had been torturous. The thought that it might have been filled me with confidence and resolve, and I walked over to him and introduced myself in Chinese. He smiled and said hello in English, his pronunciation so crisp I thought maybe he was Asian American and that I had committed a small faux pas. But then he said he taught linguistics at Bei Da. Linguistics! Good work, Shannon.

  “Are you from Beijing?”

  He nodded. “My parents are still here in the city.”

  I laughed. “Do you live with them?” I asked in Chinese.

  He shook his head no, but I suspected they had family dinners together five times a week. Chinese men are filial. And they can cook.

  “And you?” he asked.

  I gestured over to Julia Too. She, Lili, Sophie, and Phoebe had gone from reading magazines to leapfrogging first over one another’s backs and then up onto the couch. Pre-teenage girls strike me increasingly as hybrids of teenagers and toddlers. I was worried that they might break their necks or the couch, but decided not to intervene.

  “I live in Beijing with my daughter, Julia, and teach at Global Beijing.”

  Yang Tao looked interested. You can gauge a lot about people in the first five sentences of a conversation with them. At the word daughter, for example, eyes may rise up and away in search of an escape. Yang Tao’s gaze settled momentarily on Julia Too and then came back to me. “She looks like you,” he said, and I smiled. To Chinese people, Julia Too looks utterly American, with her light, wispy hair and green eyes. To me, she’s a striking replica of Da Ge.

  “Do you teach English literature?” Yang Tao asked.

  Shannon must have told him. “How’d you guess?”

  He looked at me patiently. “You don’t look like a math teacher,” he said.

  Then we sawed at hunks of turkey and had meaningful eye contact during dinner. Xiao Wang and Anne talked politely about the difference between the Chinese school Lili was enrolled in, which required nine hours of school and six hours of homework every day, and Global Beijing, which fostered creativity and “individual time.” I could h
ear Xiao Wang tsk’ing disapprovingly when Anne said that Phoebe, Sophie, and Julia Too were auditioning to be shabop girls in GB’s “Little Shop of Horrors.”

  “Kids should have a little fun,” I interjected, grinning.

  “Maybe it’s okay to do free-time activity on the weekends,” Xiao Wang said.

  “You’re a slave driver,” I teased her. “You don’t even let them play on weekends, which is why they always sleep at my place.”

  Xiao Wang sighed. “Someone has to be guidance for them,” she said. Whenever Julia Too sleeps at Lili’s, Xiao Wang wakes them pre-sunrise to pursue culturally enriching activities. At my house, we stagger out of bed at ten and make waffles.

  “Waffles,” I said, and Xiao Wang rolled her eyes. Anne looked bewildered.

  “I love waffles,” Yang Tao said, and I knew I’d sleep with him. I was impressed that he knew what waffles were, and certain that he did not, could not, like them. Which meant he was scrambling for shared interests. Shannon raised her eyebrows up and down, and I ignored her.

  “Zhang Sun,” she said, “go get the potatoes—I forgot them in the oven.”

  He left agreeably and came back carrying a tray of shredded, stir-fried potatoes.

  “Sorry whities,” Shannon joked. “I had to make something with wenr,” flavor. Zhang Sun and Yang Tao and Xiao Wang were all pushing turkey around on their plates. Chinese people hate turkey, and they’re right—it’s a dry, hideous bird that tastes like beak and bones. Everyone devoured the potatoes right away, and Shannon sighed. “We should’ve just had Chinese food,” she said.

  “There’s still time!” Zhang Sun said, and ran back to the kitchen. We could instantly hear sizzling oil and smell garlic smoke from whatever he had begun stir-frying.

  I excused myself to peek in at the kids’ table in the living room; the girls were chatting at the table, and I stood there, my own childhood Thanksgivings on a gritty film strip in my mind: my father attaching leaves to the grown-ups’ table and carving wings, my scrawny cousins in floral dresses, my mother and her sister Ruth interrupting each other and laughing with my grandmother, whose earrings had so many dangling parts they looked like the skeletons of thousand-limbed beasts.

  “Mom! What are you doing?” The girls had all turned and were looking at me. I wondered how many minutes I had been standing there, silent.

  “I’m, um, taking a picture of you guys.” I looked around. “I forgot the camera!” I said, “Silly me,” and went to get a camera. I overheard Phoebe say, “Your mom is weird.”

  In order to demonstrate my normalcy, I came back and took pictures of the girls, who promptly forgot my weirdness once they were grinning and posing.

  But on the way home, Julia Too was anxious. She’s been preoccupied lately with what she calls “the way different people see the same things,” a philosophical question about consciousness. For her, it expresses itself as: “Okay. I look at blue and Lili looks at blue and we both call it blue, but how do I know what she sees is actually blue? I mean, how do I know my blue isn’t her red, but we both just call it blue?”

  “I don’t know what my friends mean sometimes,” she said in the taxi home. “I don’t know if words mean the same things to all of us.”

  “What happened?”

  “Do you think I’m weird, Mom?”

  I thought about this. “I don’t think being weird is a bad thing.”

  She sighed, annoyed. “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I think you’re interesting.”

  “So you do think I’m weird.”

  “I don’t really like that word for it—I think you’re unique, special, imaginative.”

  “Weird,” she said. Her stubbornness reminded me of Da Ge, scared me. But maybe her weirdness reminded her of me, scared her.

  “You’re the best person I’ve ever met,” I said, “fascinating, hilarious, brave.”

  “You’re my mother.”

  “I consider myself lucky.”

  “I don’t think the kids at GB think I’m the best person.”

  “But what do you think of them?”

  It’s not that I don’t want other kids to like her; I’d just prefer it if she cared less whether they do. Most of my girlfriends, including the original Julia, are so preoccupied with whether people like them that they forget to consider their own preferences. This seems especially true in their relationships with guys. I may have been certifiable, but I always cared whether I liked a guy more than whether he liked me. I’d like to pass this trait on to Julia Too. But she didn’t answer, and I didn’t press it, which makes me think I can’t stop the slipping toward becoming my mother. Even knowing we’re becoming our moms doesn’t make it possible to change course. My mother had a policy of “sparing me pain,” which included not telling me anything that might hurt me and not asking anything that might embarrass either of us. Her intentions were loving and protective, but the results, not so good, are obvious. Fatherless girl raises fatherless girl, and in trying to spare her pain, pains her. I’m repeating history in such a literal way it’s like a monkey exhibit. See, do.

  So here’s a new family tack, disclosure. I will tell this story whole, including the unsavory parts about my insanity, complicity, failure. Naturally, neither Teacher Hao nor Xiao Wang approves of my telling Julia Too about Da Ge; they’re scandalized that I’m writing any of this down at all. Xiao Wang can’t believe I even keep a diary. “Why write those private businesses down?” she asked me recently. “What if somebody reads them?”

  “That’s the idea,” I said. “I want Julia Too to have an account when she’s older.”

  “It’s very American,” Xiao Wang said, “you want to make the private thing public. Like reality TV.”

  “Except nobody wins any money,” I said, laughing.

  So here, a free tidbit for the sake of truth: tonight, Julia Too was asleep, our apartment sweet and peaceful, and I happily alphabetized every condiment in the kitchen.

  December 1989, New York, NY

  Dear Teacher,

  Before she die, I learn important thing from my mother. She say do not become famous. Famous is like pig becoming fat to cook and eat. She say stay in back. But I can not enjoy life this way so I am always a trouble to her, always the loudest speaker, biggest hooligan, one who have the most ideas about what he hear and read. This make my mother afraid and my father proud, because he is famous and fat like delicious pig. Now I see the poor people in New York, with no home, sometime the crazy people. I hear both the idea of my father and mother. She say I should give money and clothes—because I have something they have nothing. My father think this begging is a job and I should not support this big boss who tell the beggar what to do. Even he is also big boss, with unhappy peasant to work for him.

  I always give money. Maybe I am more the son of my mother than of my father. And I can not be successful career. My father would never be proud. The money I give really his money, but this thought do not make me guilty. Because people should share. The problem with China maybe not with Mao idea. In this way, China is like America. The idea is good, just the real thing do not work out. In Tiananmen last summer we think democracy is the highest goal and America is the amazing free life. Now I know America and New York are terrible mess with people in the street and on the train and sometime they have been released from hospital but they need hospital. I know some of them, maybe, and so do you. Maybe we all know those people. Now I think even the idea of America is not good. At least in China, we believe to help other people, and not let them live on the street like here, people are dying of AIDS must live in cardboard box. Chinese idea is everyone should be equal. Everyone do the work, and share the problem of the country and the good part. In your America, everyone must be alone. But because of the money, everyone who is not American and do not realized this want to come here anyway. Million of people line up every day to the American embassy in China and other country. Now I live here and I feel surprising. When I come to America, ev
eryone say it would be heaven. But when I arrive or begin to live here, I know that America is like the idea of China—just an idea. Not a real revolution. Not a real dream place. Not even democracy. Don’t you agree?

  Da Ge

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Decembers

  DA GE HAD SKIPPED ENTIRE WEEKS OF CLASSES WHEN AN Embassy administrator stopped by my classroom the week before Christmas. Bonita Verna might as well have had a “Hello! My name is Bonnie!” name tag on her forehead. The first time we met, at a training seminar, she told me during the lunch break that she could type 118 words a minute. I was stacking salami on rye bread. I wondered if I could count 118 words a minute. I looked up from my sandwich and said, “That’s fantastic!” and she liked me tremendously for it. I wondered what other faculty at Embassy had said.

  I was writing my daily maxim on the board when Bonita bounded in. My plan was to write a maxim every day until the last day of class, when I would write, “There is nothing so useless as a general maxim.” My dad always liked that sort of nerd humor.

  “The devil makes work for idle hands!” Bonita read out.

  “Very good, Bonita!” I said. “You’re coming along.”

  She laughed. “Two quick things,” she said, “One, this Chinese kid, Dodger.”

  “Guh,” I said. “The G is hard.”

  She looked at me. I looked down at my shoes, black with silver buckles.

  “He’s sensitive about that,” I said.

  She seemed to like that. “Oh,” she said. “Dah Guh.”

  I watched his name jag out of her mouth, all sharp and silver like cutlery. Chopped proverbs came at me: easy come, a bird in the hand, curiosity killed, don’t bite the hand, birds of a feather, a man is known, too many cooks, if you can’t beat them, don’t count, easy go, is worth two in the bush, the cat, that feeds you, flock together, the company he keeps, join them, your chickens—Stop! I thought.